Have the BPM goalposts moved?

My last post asked Where is the BPM Market going? and opened the way for discussion (mostly on Twitter) about the changing state of the BPM marketplace.

Thanks to Craig, The Process Ninja, we can now look at the latest analysts offerings from Gartner and Forrester in the form of the Forrester Wave for BPM suites and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Software.

Wait! Hold-up now. "Intelligent Business Process Management Software", you say? What the hell is that?

Gartner has made changes to the classification of BPM solutions by redefining the marketplace. They are referring to this as "an evolution of the BPMS market" that is "centered on a new IBO use case". IBO in this case means Intelligent Business Operations. It is the same thing they did several years ago when the Magic Quadrant for Pure-Play BPM morphed into the Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites.

In other words, they've moved the goalposts!

Further analysis of the underlying reason for this reveals that Gartner feels that iBPMS represents a maturation of the capability and is used typically at higher levels of BPM maturity.

But the problem is they are pushing the same products as they had in the previous Magic Quadrant  for BPMS - which they say cannot be compared with this iBPMS Magic Quadrant.

My recollection of the earlier Magic Quadrant showed a group of vendors in the top right sector of the diagram with a number of other vendors trailing down a diagonal to the bottom left. The new Magic Quadrant shows a wider spread of vendors, many of whom can be found in the lower right quadrant. In Gartner speak this indicates that they are visionaries, but lack the ability to execute on their vision.

So what am I to do if I am a Gartner customer looking to identify which vendor I can pursue to fulfill my needs?

I might previously have gone for a Metastorm offering (for example) as they were highly regarded and in the top right quadrant. They have since been purchased by Open Text and now languish in the lower left quadrant as being niche players with an incomplete vision and a lack of ability to execute. Does this mean the purchase has been a failure? Not at all. But the goalposts have moved.

I worked for American multinationals who would only look at vendors who landed in the top right quadrant of the Gartner grid. As of the current offering this would reduce the market down to three vendors. In many multinationals that's not even enough to put out an Invitation to Tender as a minimum of four vendors are needed.

But is that a problem?

Well it might be if you are one of the vendors who was in a more elevated position and now find yourself in a less elevated position, but if we look at the Forrester Wave report for BPM suites we find some sobering statistics. In a survey of 520 IT decision makers in Q4 2012, when asked "What are your firm's plans to adopt BPM tools", fully 43% said they were not interested or had no plans and only 27% said they were planning to implement.

When the same group were asked "What are your firm's plans to use Software as a Service (SaaS) to complement or replace your BPM software?", 52% answered that they did not know or had no plans to us SaaS and only 33% had plans to do so in 2 years.

In a market where Forrester have identified 52 different vendors competing in the broader BPM market, where Gartner have redefined the goalposts about what a good vendor is, and where half the IT decisions makers are not looking at using BPM, I sense a serious disconnect.

Who are the 52 vendors marketing themselves at? Can the market sustain this onslaught?

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Where's the BPM market going?

I remember back in the deep, dark mists of time (about ten years ago, actually), The BPM market used to have several players in it. Gartner's Magic Quadrant had a diverse number of players in each of the quadrants, and it was easy to look at and understand the fragmentation. Things were called 'BPM' and everyone knew where they stood with it - although, in reality, very few people could adequately define 'BPM' as a concept.

More recently, though, the market has started to amalgamate. Major companies were purchased by competitors and their products merged together (Metastorm and Provision is one example). The fragmentation of the market decreased suddenly. The Magic Quadrant (and Forrester's Wave) had fewer parts to it. Things looked good for the BPM vendors, but, not necessarily, good for the market.

People like Gartner then started to split their BPM Magic Quadrant up into different areas. We got BPMS, and ACM and the like. Different companies were invited in to join, and, pretty soon, the market seemed to be just as wide-ranging as before.

But is it really? Or have we just moved the goalposts?

Is this a classic reorganisation the likes of which we experience in companies at regular intervals? Movement for the sake of movement.

Is it a way for some of the consulting companies and business integrators to muddy the waters for customers and justify large consulting fees?

Or is the market genuinely in the throes of some major increase in the number of vendors working in a particular niche? Are we on the cusp of an explosion of products that will help customers conquer the BPM beast?

I'm not sure I know the answer myself, but I suspect a number of my readers will have opinions on this. Feel free to share in the comments below.

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The Path of Least Resistance

Not far from where I live, there is a DIY store on an out-of-town trading estate. It is surrounded on all sides by dual carriageway roads and the only, real, access to it is by vehicular transport. However on the opposite side of this dual carriageway is a housing estate. I was waiting at the nearby traffic lights yesterday and noticed that from the fence surrounding the estate there appeared to be the beginnings of a pathway that had been worn by pedestrians across the central grass reservation of the dual carriageway and into a hole in the fence surrounding the DIY store. As I watched I saw at least three people take the route from the estate, across the dual carriageway, into the store.

It struck me as being a prime example of people finding a way of doing things that wasn't originally anticipated in the design of the thing.

When they first built the store and surrounded it by roads, nobody imagined that people would actually want to walk to the store. But people found a way. What's more they found the path of least resistance to achieve their goals.

The same happens in processes. You can design a process in whatever way you want, but people (users) will always find the easiest way to achieve their goal, and it may ot be by using the process in the way you anticipated. More often than not this should be the way the process should be designed in the first place.

Always bear this in mind when designing processes.

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Size Matters.

One thing I have learned since leaving the comfortable role I held in a huge American multinational and starting my own business is that large companies do not have a clue about how to run a responsive organisation.

They are slow (and very resistant) to change, unreactive and labouring. Their processes are usually large and complicated, and this results in a lack of ability to go with quick changes that are often required.

The governance process I worked with within the multi-national involved tortuous meetings with nineteen interested parties where prospective change agents would plead their case for why their particular affiliate/department/competency was different and required something to be changed. This would all then be discussed, moderated and voted upon. More often than not the stupid, nonsensical ideas would be passed, whereas the ones that would genuinely make a difference to the business were blocked. Sure, we would let the Spanish affiliate have its own, Spanish language, portal. And if we were doing that then we would also let Italy have an Italian language one, Portugal have their own and Germany and France have their own. But would we hold all these and sanction a European (or company wide) portal that was multi-lingual and customisable? No, not a chance.

Why? Size.

An affiliate that deals with its own portal can budget for its own portal. It can manage its own portal and it can pay for its own portal. If we put something in that is cross European (or global) then money has to be found from other budgets and responsibility for maintenance has to be found too. The fact that the money and resource all come, in effect, from the same big bucket is carefully swept under the table. It becomes a political game.

But in a small company, such as the one that I and millions of other small businessmen run around the world, something like this is a simple, no-brainer. Do we need a portal? Yes. Can we afford it? Yes. Do it! The governance is light and quick and the decision is made pretty much instantly.

The same can be said for process. Things work on a process in every company. In smaller companies the process is probably very light and fluid. Checks and balances might not be as necessary as they are in larger companies. But the ability to modify or redesign a process is a lot easier in smaller companies. We can react to the market conditions and change direction/strategy/ market a lot quicker.

So if small companies can do this so much quicker, why are they not ruling the world? Well, when they start to rule the world they get bigger and the ability to react as quickly disappears. Companies like Amazon and Google were once small start-ups. They had small staff numbers, small capital and big ideas. They were responsive to what the market wanted and they could pivot on a sixpence if needed. They could fail quickly and move on. This mentality is now no longer there to the same extent (although a lot of this is cultural. Google’s “Spend 20% of your time on your own projects” ethos has now fallen pretty much by the wayside, for example)

So what are larger companies to do? How can they become leaner and more reactive? The answer is easy (although the implementation is not). To become leaner and quicker you have to.. become leaner and quicker. Remove the levels of bureaucracy that slow down changes. Keep the organisational chart  shallow enough that you can get the decision makers into a room and make decisions quickly. Put the decision makers at the right place in the organisation. I’ve talked previously about process owners and the need for them to be at the board level. This is an immediate example of why.

Sure, size matters. 

But not in the way you think.

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Entrenched Thinking

I’ve written before on this blog about entrenched thinking “The Way It’s Always Been Done”. But I think the time is ripe for visit this topic because it is still something that occurs a lot more than we would like in companies.

What is it?

The example I give - one passed down from my father - is the dry cleaning business which had a rather erratic and nonsensical route for the delivery truck to take. More details can be found here :


What that story illustrates is that there are decisions which are taken at a corporate level each and every day which are not always based on sound business judgement, but are based on historical reasons for doing things.

That’s bad, right?

Not that there is anything wrong with checking history when looking at why we do things. But businesses must remember that situations change over time and what was, historically, true may no longer by something to consider. My other example is related to the insurance industry and can be found here:

Both of these stories have an underlying symptom which is more relevant to today's working environment: Resistance to change.

Resistance to change

Sure, it’s easy to continue doing things the ways you’ve always done them. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy. It works. Changing the way something is done can lead to confusion, uncertainty, unfamiliarity, even a decrease in quality of the final product, but all of these things are just temporary. When I was nearing the end of high school, a classmate had an accident which resulted in him severing most of the tendons in his right arm, (the one he wrote with). Overnight he was forced to learn to write left handed. The initial results were not good but by the time examinations came around his hand writing was as good with his left hand as it had been with his right hand.

This shows that change - whilst not always welcome or expected - does not have to be bad. But it does need to be managed.

People need to understand why change has to occur. People need to have help in understanding how to change. Most of all people need to feel that they are being listened to and that their input is being heard.

Of course, this isn’t easy. But research has shown (and my own anecdotal evidence has confirmed) that bad change management is one of the key points of failure amongst projects. 

End users are not often told why things need to change. They are not told what the benefit is of changing. Mostly, though, they are not compensated for following the new behaviours

Compensation?

It has often been said that what gets measured gets rewarded. If this is the case then measuring adherence to implemented changes and rewarding users  for that will certainly increase uptake. Conversely, punishing users for adherence to the old way of doing things will have a similar affect, but will be viewed in a slightly less positive light.

Summary

Change is good. At least change with the intention of improving things. Entrenched thinking can be a source of inefficiency, resistance and cost and needs to be overcome to improve process. The opposite, of course, is true: needless change for the seek of it isn’t going to win you many friends either.

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Filming for TV: Some thoughts on process ownership

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will realise that I do, occasionally, like to look into things that happen in every day life and try to understand the process issues inherent within them.  I want to move onto something related, but a little different.

Television.

I was fortunate enough recently to spend time working on a new comedy series to be produced for UK television. It was filmed (as many comedy programs are nowadays) in from of a live studio audience.

This is different to a lot of things I have filmed in the past for two reasons

1) There is a live studio audience!

2) The dynamics of command and control are very subtly different.

Let me explain.

In ‘filmed’ television (‘Downton Abbey’, for example), the director is in charge of the filming production and the first assistant director (1st AD) is in charge of running the set. The chain of command goes Director --> 1st AD --> heads of department. It’s a little slow, but it works and it keep the unions happy. Filming is done with one camera at a time (usually) and the final footage is edited together separately for transmission.

Television works quite differently. For a start there are more cameras. On the show I did recently there were five cameras running independently. These were big broadcast cameras which didn’t have on-board recording facilities. The signal from their feed was sent to a control room where they were mixed together by a producer. He is - effectively - editing the show as it is being filmed. 

Takes are quite long and complex involving a lot of camera movement and choreography. If a camera isn’t in the right place at the right time the take is blown and we have to go again.

So far, so good. But here’s the rub. I couldn’t work out who was in charge on the set. Sure there is a director and 1st AD. These two worked together in a similar way to on a film set. But there was also the producer character who was involved in all the artistic decisions because he had to make it all work in the control room. The issue came when the Director wanted one thing and the producer wanted another. It became a case of review & decide, cajole & threaten in order to reach a compromise. And a compromise is never good, artistically.

But the whole discussion got me to thinking about a topic which is close to my heart : Process Ownership. I think it's accepted that processes need to have somebody responsible for them. But is it accepted what the scope of process ownership should be? I don't think so.

I think that process ownership is oftentimes equated to project ownership at the senior level. In many cases someone is allocated project ownership at C-level purely as a way of ensuring that the project is seen as having “clout”. In reality the assigned C-level executive has minimal, if any, ’skin in the game’ for this project.

And so it is with processes.

An executive Vice President for finance might be nominated as the process owner for a process in the finance department, but - in the big scheme of things - has very little, if any, involvement in the day to day running or execution of the process. Some would say that this is fine - after all, why would a senior executive need to be involved at that level?  But I have a different opinion. I am sure that the are arguments that can equate the ROI of having the exec manage a process vs delegating, and these are all totally valid calculations. 

But they miss the big picture. 

Process is not something that happens in parts of an organisation. Process is something that happens across the whole organisation and having someone who can manage that at the organisational level makes a lot of sense. Any lower in the organisation and you start to suffer from the problem of silo mentality and not invented here syndrome. But at the senior level you have someone who has both the executive clout and the mandate to manage a process from start to finish right across the organisation.

However the logical extension of this is that there are going to be senior executives who mange processes but who will not manage them appropriately. Take, for example, a senior Vice President of Finance who is managing a process which touches more areas than just finance. If a change needs to be made he will, most likely (and politically) favour his own department if anything needs to be done that is positive, and favour other departments if negative changes need to be made. This is human nature. Of course the simple way to do that is by following the old guideline of “whatever gets measured gets managed”. If you recompense the finance executive on his ability to appropriately manage the whole of the process rather than on the results of the finance department alone, this will start to remove any political bias that may exist.

On the other side of things is the issue we experience in the TV studio where the process owner is not adequately defined and this results in two people having differing idea related to a change. They end up with a compromise, and this is - by definition - less than optimal.

Of course this isn't easy. Nothing at this level ever is, process even more so because it covers a larger part of the organisation. But these are the challenges that need to be addressed to make process management as a competency work in your company.

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The CPO

In the style of Seth Godin.

If process is so important, and everything that happens in a company is a result of process occurring, why doesn't every company have a Chief Process Officer?

Reason: We haven't built a compelling, cost-effective, and succinct reason to install a CPO.

But the bigger question is : Why haven't we?

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Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you. Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.

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